Returning from Saturday’s massive demonstration, a sight that really caught my eye was a couple of young women dressed as Al Capone style gangsters standing on the station escalator behind some other young women with hijabs and a Palestinian flag.

If someone had been riding a penny farthing outside the station, dressed as Henry the Eighth with an ostrich on a leash, people would have ignored him for being an attention seeker.

Coming a few days after Starmer chose to resurrect Enoch Powell by doubling the amount of time required before becoming eligible for British citizenship and talking about “an island of strangers”, it struck me that there is a beauty in 400 000 or more people taking to the streets to try to save the lives of strangers more than 2000 miles away.

The homemade placard the woman in the photo is holding spoke for everyone who was on the streets that day. It is a rejection of the support given to Israel’s genocide by Labour and the Tories, it is an expression of class solidarity and practical internationalism. It is a refusal to accept that societies need racist politicians expressing a hatred of immigrants virtually every time they speak.

Unless you walk through a demonstration of this size it is really hard to appreciate the range of organisations, strands of thinking and welcoming atmosphere when so many people come together. Saturday’s had large numbers of Muslim families walking alongside every shade of the British left. Vegans, gardeners, unions, environmentalists, secular and religious Jewish organisations and church groups all marching together. Even the dancing leprechaun with weird slogans and quotes from the Book of Revelation on his placards who is a fixture at every demonstration in London is looked on indulgently.

The England that Starmer is trying to appeal to is the England of union jacks outside pubs, the demoralised run down places where the undercurrent of racism is often tangible.

 Saturday’s demonstration was not just a march in defence of the people of Gaza. It was hundreds of thousands of people asserting that they are in favour of welcoming and supporting strangers and rejecting everything Starmer, Farage and Powell represent.